Previews

LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy

With a wave of a hand and a "These aren't the droids you're looking for," Ben gets Luke and the droids into Mos Eisley. Right form the get-go, this level introduces you to how vehicles are handled in LSW2. Unlike the original where the vehicle stages were on rails, you can now freely drive Luke's landspeeder around the town. If you hop out to go exploring, don't get too far away from it or Jawas will come along and whisk it back to the beginning of the stage.

At one point, you're forced to find a way to clear a blocked road. By exploring the immediate area, you find piles of stray LEGO bricks. A little bit of building with them, and you've put together a full-sized AT-ST. Hop into the Imperial vehicle and blow the barrier away. You can now roam around in the walker, picking off stormtroopers with ease.

If there's one thing that this stage is good for showing off, it's the variety of extra goodies that you can find by thoroughly exploring a level. Run down a stray alley, and you find a "Double Score Zone" where any LEGO studs (the game's currency) that you collect are worth twice as much. Hop onto the right rooftop, and you'll find a Womp Rat shooting gallery mini-game. Done using the landspeeder? Find the hidden used vehicle lot and sell it to the Jawas for studs. Want more studs for your speeder? Run it through the car wash first to tidy it up before selling.

Sure enough, at the end of the stage you meet up with Han Solo and his faithful Wookiee partner, Chewbacca, where you can take control of them as well.

From Tatooine, it's off to the Death Star to save Princess Leia before she's executed. Since the Death Star is crawling with stormtroopers, it would be best to try and blend in. Luckily, Luke and Han have donned a couple of stolen stormtrooper uniforms, but in this game, they don't have helmets. Luckily, whenever you get to a door that only stormtroopers can get through (there are cameras mounted near the doors), there tends to be a helmet dispenser nearby. In a cute touch, all the characters can use the dispenser with some humorous results -- Chewbacca's head is too large for the helmet to fit on, so it sits awkwardly atop his Wookiee dome. When Luke and Han are wearing the helmets, enemy stormtroopers will ignore them. That is, unless one of the heroes starts shooting.

In addition to stormtroopers, you'll also face off against TIE fighter pilots and Imperial officers. Near the end of the stage, you must provide cover fire for a computer-controlled Ben Kenobi as he attempts to shut down the tractor beam that is keeping the Millennium Falcon aboard the Death Star.

This level is the second half of your romp through the Death Star. With Leia freshly sprung from her cell, you begin the stage in the Death Star's trash compactor. Once you escape, it's just a matter of blasting your way through the hordes of stormtroopers until you reach the Falcon. This level contains a fairly complicated puzzle that involves multiple character swaps and lever switching.